Ray Winstone

Hackney-born tough guy Ray Winstone, 51, tells us where he takes it easy

Interview: Sian Thatcher

“I LOVE GOING ON HOLIDAY. I DON’T get much chance to visit any more, as I’m so busy with work, but some of the best holidays I’ve had have been in Italy. There’s not a place I’ve been to there that I didn’t like. I’ve been to Florence, I’ve done Rome, I’ve done all them places, but there’s something really rugged about Sicily that I kind of love. It just oozes a bit of class.

“I’ve got a friend, and his family lived out in Valguarnera, up in the mountains. It looks like Death Valley up there and you can almost see the two guys from The Godfather walking across with guns slung over their shoulders. When we visited I couldn’t stop mumbling the theme from the film. Just beautiful.

“Another place I love is Barcelona. You get the lamb off the bone in the clay ovens and all that. It can be a strange-looking city. The women there have long necks and they’ve got this way of walking – there’s a gracefulness about them. In any other city, you’d think they were being snooty, but they’re not, it’s just the style of the place. I do love Barcelona a lot.

“I fell out of love with Spain for a while, though, down on the Costa Brava. It just became too English. But I fell in love with it again when I went back to do Sexy Beast. I went to a little place called Agua Amarga. It was beautiful. It’s a national park, a village set on the beach. It was all Spanish. When you go away to countries you want to see that.

“I travel a fair bit to watch football, too – I went to Germany for the last World Cup and loved it. Me and my mates left on 6 June, which was D-Day, and went across on the Channel Tunnel in the car then drove up from France through Belgium. We stayed in Arnhem in Holland on the way, and went to see all the war graves, the German graves as well. That’s what war is, war’s a terrible thing. You see kids of 17, 18, you see brothers in the same place and you think, ‘How lucky are we?’. It was a very sad moment, but a great thing to see, and something I’ll never forget.”

Ray Winstone’s football blinders & blunders is out now, released by 4dvd and priced €24.a